


before the moment's gone

by goldcarnations



Series: permanent temporary residence [3]
Category: Never Have I Ever (TV)
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - College/University, Angst, Bad Sex, Casual Sex, Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Pining, Post-Break Up, Talking, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-12
Updated: 2020-06-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:29:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24637594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldcarnations/pseuds/goldcarnations
Summary: “Do you ever wonder what it would be like if we were still together?” she laughs, brittle. “If we didn't break up?”It’s code forI still think about you all the time.Everything is coded. But he’s known her for over a decade. She knows that he can read between the lines.
Relationships: Ben Gross/Devi Vishwakumar
Series: permanent temporary residence [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1781386
Comments: 14
Kudos: 106





	before the moment's gone

**Author's Note:**

> there needs to be more angst in this tag so here i am
> 
> i wrote this to be in the same verse as [senior superlatives](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24513076) but the tone and overall style is so different that it definitely also works as a stand-alone fic. hell, if you squint it could kinda-sorta work with [consequentialism](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24000841). but you can do what you want! i'm not the boss of you
> 
> the title & melancholy vibes for this fic were HEAVILY based on no. 1 party anthem by arctic monkeys. give it a listen for a more enriching experience

Tonight is, inconveniently, one of _those nights_. 

It happens less and less three months later, but those nights still happen. It's a kind of night that requires a tub of ice cream or a gallon of alcohol or both. Unrealistic, playfully misogynistic romantic comedies. Laying under her sheets in fetal position. Regretting the break up. Feeling raw and pitiful over it. A shit ton of self-loathing, and even more pathetic wallowing.

It's a night of self indulgence. _Self care_. That's what she'll call it.

The fantastic, wonderful thing about tonight is that Devi's free to indulge as much as she wants: her roommate isn't here. Her roommate is usually great at distracting Devi when she needs it and stopping her from doing things she'll regret, but tonight she's out with her boyfriend; it feels pointed, but obviously isn't.

So Devi _indulges._ She scrolls through Ben's Instagram feed and reads through her old text conversations and contemplates, for a fleeting, ridiculous moment, deleting his contact.

She stops when she recognizes his contact photo.

The photo is a selfie of the two of them, back when they were still together, on their graduation day. She’s biting her salutatorian medal and Ben’s kissing her on the cheek. He had been insufferable the whole day about having the highest GPA in their class and she definitely would have delivered the valedictory better than he did, but it was the happiest day of her life. It still is.

It's a good photo.

She hasn’t actually seen Ben in a while. Three months, to be exact. But there are objects that he left in her room that she’s left, amenities she’s kept around as if it’ll make her feel better: the toothbrush in her bathroom caddy, the reading light he installed in her room above her bed that he would alway bump his head on, the faded orange hoodie from when she found out they were going to the same college.

It still smells like him. The hoodie, that is. She wears it when she misses him.

Tonight, she misses him a fucking _lot_. 

The terrible, hilarious part about all the yearning and shittiness is that she feels so much of it, but has nowhere to put it. Typically she’ll bottle it up, but tonight in particular it’s unbearable. She opens up a new message, and before she can stop herself, she types out a text to him:

_hey i miss you_

Embarrassment and longing war within her. She can’t send that message. There are rules against sending messages like that. _Protocols_ against it, probably. 

But she also can’t bring herself to delete it. 

They can be friends, she justifies to herself with a sudden, angry, contrite type of self-righteousness. They had been quasi-friends for most of her life, and they can do it now. The thought is so convincing that she opens his contact page and stares and stares at his number and gets impatient from the staring and waiting and hollowness of all of it. 

So she calls him.

There are rules against that too, but he picks up before she can remember what they are.

* * *

Objectively, _retrospectively,_ they’re astonishingly bad at being exes. 

Devi in particular. She's still wearing his hoodie when she heads over to his dorm room.

* * *

They sit facing each other like they used to: Devi on the edge of the bed, Ben’s back against the wall.

Ben’s room is messy, and it surprises her because he’s always had an affinity for tidiness for as long as she’s known him. It isn’t a big mess by any measure, but it’s enough to be alarming. Disposable Starbucks coffee cups litter the ground. A small pile of laundry pile against his dresser. His stout little desk in the corner of his single drowns in loose-leaf papers and those pretentious, unnecessary fountain pens that he never used while they were dating but always insisted on having. 

The state of the room, the innocuous _disarray_ , is so unlike him that it takes her a couple minutes to survey the damage silently. 

Ben catches her eye and brushes it off.

“Sorry about all this,” he apologizes, rubbing a palm against his eyes. He's in his pajamas. The normally round edges of his face are gaunt and tired. “I’ve been busy.”

Her eyes flicker to his face, where he’s now studiously avoiding her gaze. “Busy? With what?”

“Ah, you know. Midterms. I’ve got one due in a few days.”

She doesn’t entirely believe him, but she’s not really sure what her role is in his life anymore. It’s probably not _nagging girlfriend_ or even _prying, nosy friend_. So she bites her lip and nods. “Nerd. Sounds like a drag.”

Something loosens behind his eyes, around his jaw. Tension successfully averted.

“Actually, this one is kind of sick. I’m writing a paper. A feminist critique on twentieth century labor?” Ben tells her. His eyes are bright now; he’s always been the type to get excited about his intellectual pursuits, even when they’re something as mundane as a paper for a class. “It’s getting very in-the-weeds with cost-benefit relating to the intersection of women’s and worker’s rights, a little too much policy analysis, as always, what else is new, and maybe—too political?” He blinks once. “Maybe I should be worried?”

Even the way he rambles out loud about his academic assignments is so painfully bittersweet, so _familiar_ , that Devi physically hurts from it. But she only has herself to blame. After all, she basically invited herself over, so she tilts her head and leans back and painstakingly trains her eyes to his bedside table as she thinks over her answer.

“Feminism is political,” she responds airily.

This coaxes a smile out of him. His sharp edges soften. “Of course,” he says solemnly. “Forgot who I was dealing with.”

Devi lifts a shoulder. “You asked.” 

“My fault.”

“ _Fault_?” she snorts. “You used to love it when I gave you my opinion about your essays. You _needed_ it.”

“Please, I never _needed it_. I was valedictorian, if you forgot?”

Ben's eyes are on hers, the edge of his mouth turned up, and the banter, his smile, all of it—it’s good. Comforting. _Easy_. Dangerously familiar. Like no time passed since high school. 

“How long have we known each other?” she wonders out loud.

His eyes crinkle at the corners, wry. “Too long.”

She sits in that for a while. It’s obviously a joke, but the response feels too real to be glib: frankly, she’s known him for most of her formative years, if not all of them. He’s a part of her by now. An extension of her character. Sometimes she gets the awful feeling that he knows her more than anyone ever will, and the feeling smarts, _aches_. It’s lonely.

But she breathes in sharply. Breathes out. 

Readjusts.

Moves past it. Whatever _it_ is.

“Any plans for the weekend?” she asks lightly.

“Other than finishing this essay?” 

“Do not tell me that you’re just gonna jerk off to labor history this weekend.”

He doesn’t laugh—he fidgets. His answer is so quiet that she almost doesn’t hear what he says.

“I, uh. Have a date. This weekend.”

Devi's next breath wilts in her throat. It strangles itself to death. 

Well. So much for _moving past it_. Any of it. All of it. 

She chokes out a high pitched noise. “You’re—you’re dating? Already?”

Ben's eyes are on the floor again. 

“Trying to,” he says. “But I’m lousy at it.”

She wants to laugh out of offense or discomfort, but it stops in her throat. The guilt from her reaction creeps up on her. It isn’t as if she hasn’t been on a couple dates herself. Plus, it’s been three months. Time hadn’t always felt linear in that span of time, but it’s a suitable buffer period. A _valid_ buffer period. It’s not Ben’s fault that he’s trying to move on.

And here they are, tiptoeing along a line that seems awfully blurred, diligently ignoring the passage of time in a room that’s never felt as small as it does now.

“Yeah,” she finally answers. “Same.”

“It’s just been hard, you know?” He looks up and his eyes are stormy and miserable. Her heart catches in her throat. “You were my best friend.” He clears his throat. “And we were together for a long time.”

His eyes focus to hers, and her stomach clenches suddenly from how badly she _wants_. She wants him to kiss her. She wants his hands around her waist, on her cheek, in her hair. She wants him to hold her and look at her the way he used to when they were both kids, blue-eyed affection and syrupy, honeyed adoration. 

She’s suddenly hyper aware of the fact that she’s still wearing his hoodie, and even more aware of the fact that he hasn’t said anything about it.

All of this is her fault.

“Do you ever wonder what it would be like if we were still together?” she laughs, brittle. “If we didn't break up?”

It’s code for _I still think about you all the time_. Everything is coded. But he’s known her for over a decade. She knows that he can read between the lines. 

“Yeah,” he answers quietly. “I think about it a lot.”

Direct communication was never their strong suit.

Suddenly, the air between them is suffocating. Little things become difficult to reconcile in her mind. His room is tiny. The space between them is excruciatingly wide. She can’t stay here, because there are rules, and she’s supposed to follow them. 

She might currently be drowning. It’s also possible that she might have been drowning this whole time.

With a shaky exhale, Devi slides off of his bed and jumps to her feet.

Ben's eyes snap up to her standing over him, alarm flashing briefly across his face.

“Are you leaving now?”

“Yeah.” She searches for an excuse. “I just—I have somewhere to be. My roommate is looking for me.”

He nods, his eyes still fixed on hers, and doesn’t press any further. Her gut twists. If they were still dating, she’s certain that he would have stopped her. She would have spent the night, he would have lent her a toothbrush and shampoo, she would have slept in his clothes.

But that’s not allowed anymore either. They both know that.

“Text me when you get back,” he says finally, “so I know you’re safe.”

* * *

There’s a guy Devi's been texting lately. His name is Ricardo.

He’s handsome, all wavy dark hair and kind, narrow eyes. He’s Puerto Rican. He’s tall. He can speak four languages. They went on one date and he was sweet and said all the right things and didn’t fight her on a single issue. She tried to be provocative, too. Incidentally, there had been no spark. 

His dorm is in the building next to Ben’s, and there seems to be a lesson in there somewhere, or maybe a metaphor concerning juxtaposition, but when it’s this late she can’t think of what it is. More significantly, there’s a convenience to it that she’s not entirely sure she appreciates.

He answers immediately to late night texts, is the other thing.

* * *

Devi wants the lights off, and Ricardo obliges because he’s a good guy, so they fuck in the dark on his rickety twin-size dorm bed. 

The sex isn’t technically bad, but it certainly isn’t extraordinary. It’s—conflict resolution. Moving parts. Hands ripping at buttons and zippers; sloppy, perfunctory kisses on her neck; brief, impatient foreplay, if it can even count as that. She peels off Ben’s hoodie, shimmies awkwardly out of her underwear, takes his cock in her hand, breathes in, sinks down, and then she’s filled and it’s fine and both of their eyes are closed.

She allows herself to relax. To feel good. Lets her mind drift, tries desperately to focus on how Ricardo is moving against her, but her mind drifts too far and all she can see is the exact shade of blue of Ben’s eyes. 

She squeezes her eyes shut, and suddenly it’s Ben holding her. It’s Ben with a bruising grip on her wrist, it’s Ben’s hips against her own, it’s Ben’s mouth on her breast, it’s—

It’s impossible for her to keep from calling out his name, so she says it under her breath like a prayer, as quietly as she can, sobbing into her own elbow. 

She comes with a cry and nothing is fair.

* * *

Ricardo has a shared bathroom in his quad.

It’s blessedly clean. The cursory, masculine ease at which all of his bathroom essentials are strewn about makes her feel like a voyeur, reminds Devi of how removed she feels from having just had sex. The lights are incandescent. The walls are thin. Someone is playing _Let’s Get It On_ in another dorm room, but the pitched-down thrum of the bass and muffled, indistinct vocals somehow sound more melancholy than sexy.

He doesn’t have face wash, so she scrubs at her face with bar soap until her skin is raw. Then she blots her cheeks and forehead with an inexplicably damp towel.

She stares at herself in the mirror. Her reflection doesn’t look like her own: small, trembling, with red-rimmed eyes. The hollows of her face look paper-thin. Some of her mascara has bled into clumps beneath her lower lashes, smudged and intense and manic on her face. 

She doesn’t feel pretty. She’s never quite figured out how to feel pretty the way she does when it’s Ben’s eyes on her. 

Devi inhales deep, suddenly fatigued and overcome with the odd, disquieting urge to cry. Marvin Gaye croons quietly from somewhere far away, his voice lonely and singular. Unexpected tears begin to blur her vision, so she blinks rapidly and swipes at her eyes and tries to think of her next step. 

Her phone blinks on when she lifts it to check the time; it’s three in the morning, around half an hour after she left Ben’s room. Through facial recognition, her phone unlocks automatically and opens to her unsent text message to Ben.

 _hey i miss you,_ it reads.

Her fingers hesitate over the keyboard. The cursor blinks at her, waiting.

Her throat closes.

_hey i’m still in love with you_

The dread curdles in her stomach. She deletes the message letter by letter.

_miss u. tonight rly got me remembering high school lol_

* * *

Ricardo’s asleep already when she slips back into his room. Even in slumber, he’s courteously left room for her on the right side of the bed, a blank space that she crawls into, facing away from him. Her stomach crawls from hunger and the feeling of a bad habit, so she burrows deeper in his covers. Even under blankets, she’s bitterly cold.

Her phone lights up with a text. To her shock, it’s from Ben: 

_Things were a lot simpler back then._

Something about that text pulls at her, tears at her chest. _God_ , they’re so fucking bad at being broken up. Her eyes prickle with tears again. Ricardo’s snoring next to her, soft and soothing, but her side of the bed feels so distant from his that it’s hardly comforting.

She reads the text over and over until the letters become hieroglyphs. Until she’s shivering so hard she swears the bed is shaking, although if her chills are from the cold or the memory of someone else’s hands on her she’s not sure. 

She peers over the edge of the bed, and sure enough, Ben’s hoodie is still on the ground, within arm’s reach.

There are some things that aren’t technically forbidden, she reminds herself, and for the moment she surrenders to her weakness and she’s _okay_. She’s okay with that ambiguity. She’s okay with old contact photos and texts at three am and hoodies that smell like his cologne. It’s unhealthy, sure, but she lives in that gray area now. She sets up shop there. Warms her hands in it. Fuck rules, fuck protocol.

It’s still freezing. But she’s stopped shaking with his hoodie wrapped around her like a hug, and eventually the heady scent of sandalwood lulls her to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> [my tumblr/shithole/etc](https://shakespeareans.co.vu/)


End file.
